Italian Victories In Ww2, Are There Any..

Discussion in 'Axis Units' started by liba85, Dec 27, 2005.

  1. linda1192

    linda1192 Junior Member

    Linda 1192
    While we can sympathise if any of your relatives were lost with the Arandora Star - you should try to keep in mind of the conditions at that time - early 1940 - the Arandora Star was in the very centre of the retreat from both Norway and Dunkirk and saw many of her compatriots go down - Britain had thousands of Aliens - POW's - both German and Italian in various camps - as well as feeding and looking after them which was becoming difficult - it was decided that they should go to Canada - we were still under a great threat of invasion by the seemingly invincible German troops from France - but then you probably know all that already......

    The Arandors Star was thought to be faster than others and therefore like the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth and thus did not require an escort -that was an error - it should always be remembered also that she was sunk by the German Gunther Prien with his famous submarine....
    Cheers
    Thanks for that info Tom. I only mentioned it as I had been told of it as a child.
    I didn't know the history of it.
    Cheers Linda
     
  2. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    ARANDORA STAR (July 2, 1940)

    One of four ships placed at the disposal of the War Office for the transportation of enemy aliens to Canada. The Arandora Star sailed from Liverpool, without escort, to St. John's, Newfoundland, carrying 473 German male civilians interned when war broke out in 1939, and 717 Italian male civilians interned after Mussolini declared war on June 10, 1940. The vessel carried a crew of 176 and a military guard of some 200 men. Also on board were some Italian internees from internment camps on the Isle of Man, many of whom were genuine refugees mistakenly selected for deportation. The 15,501 ton Arandora Star (Blue Star Line) was torpedoed and sunk by the German U-boat U-47, (Korvkpt. Günther Prien, 1908-1941) seventy five miles off Ireland, at 7.05am. A second explosion, apparently a boiler, broke the ship in two before she finally sank at 7.40am. At about 2.30pm, the Canadian destroyer, HMCS St. Laurent, found the lifeboats and started to take the survivors on board. They reached Greenock in Scotland on Wednesday, July 3, at 8.45am. where the sick and injured were taken to Mearnskirk Hospital in Newton Mearns by a fleet of ambulances. The 813 survivors were later put on another ship, the Dunera, and transported to Australia. A total of 743 persons lost their lives on the Arandora Star: 146 Germans, 453 Italians, and 144 crew and soldiers. (The U-47 went missing on March 7, 1941) In Bardi, a village in northern Italy, a chapel has been built to commemorate the victims of the Arandora Star. This disaster changed British internment policy. From then on, all internees were interned in British camps only. (On a remote cliff on the island of Colansay a memorial was unveiled to commemorate all those who perished and in particular to a Giusseppe Delgrosso whose body was washed ashore near this spot. Near the memorial plaque is a cairn of stones. All visitors are requested to bring a stone and add it to the cairn so that it will continue to grow)
     
  3. linda1192

    linda1192 Junior Member

    Thank you Peter for this article.
    Most enlightening, yet like most war recollections very sad.
     
  4. PeterG

    PeterG Senior Member

    ARANDORA STAR (July 2, 1940)
    A total of 743 persons lost their lives on the Arandora Star: 146 Germans, 453 Italians, and 144 crew and soldiers.
    Two thirds of the Italians died, all civilians. For the crew, the figures were 42 dead out of 174, whilst the army guards lost 37 out of 200.

    Questions were immediately raised as to why the Italian losses were so high and that of crew and guards comparatively low. On 9 July the Shipping Minister, Ronald Cross, told the Commons "Lifeboats and life-rafts more than sufficient to accommodate all passengers and crew were provided", the implication being that the passengers were to blame for not saving themselves - and this was the precise argument that the Foreign Office had used in a note to the Swiss Legation and Brazilian Embassy on 4 July advising them of the disaster: "More lives would probably have been saved had not many of the prisoners of war and internees refused to make use of rafts which were at once thrown overboard when the ship was torpedoed".

    The accounts given by surviving senior crew members told an entirely different story, particularly that of the Chief Officer and highest ranking member of the crew, F. S. Brown, corroborated in a further composite report by the ship's chief engineer and Major Brown of the guard. Contrary to what the Shipping Minister had told the House, there was insufficient space on the lifeboats and rafts. The Italians were on the lowest deck and when they arrived on deck the few lifeboats were already full to capacity as were the life-rafts.

    The Arandora Star carried 14 boats with a capacity of not more than 1,000. The day of the sinking there were 1,564 on board. Moreover, not all 14 lifeboats were launched, six were smashed.

    Chief Officer Brown agreed that life-rafts were thrown overboard as the Minister had claimed, but commented "The three big rafts were filled up and the small floats were practically useless", and he added damningly, "It was impossible to save more".

    Source "Collar the Lot!: How Britain Interned and Expelled its Wartime Refugees" by Peter and Leni Gillman.
     
  5. :huh:Just thought I'd add my two bobs worth on the quality of their firearms.

    Had just picked up Carcano rifle and carbine on our way out of town going pig shooting.Had a great time being chased by a rather large boar, had two boxes of 6.5 ammo and could not get one to fire, either the rifle or carbine.

    If I had of been in the army and been issued with weapons and ammo like that I think I would have surrended sooner than later.

    They may have made great arms but surely it would be an advantage if they would fire. Would at least give you a bit of confidence.

    Cheers Rob
     
  6. spidge

    spidge RAAF RESEARCHER

  7. linda1192

    linda1192 Junior Member

    Thank you all for your postings.
    Very interesting read, and sadness for all those that lost their lives so that we may be free.
    Linda
     
  8. micky

    micky Member

    Brian

    I said at the very outset that I hadn't read the book (I see it appeared in 1966) so I am in absolutely no position to comment on what Seaman James Frederick Wilde did.

    Rather than bickering, if you have the book, could you give the name of the battalion he commanded and where he served?

    An Italian Partisan battalion (battaglione) was a formation of between 90 and 180 men. All formations came in multiples of three, the smallest being a squad (squadra) of from 10 to 20 men. Three squadre formed a company (compagnia) and three compagnie a battaglione. Three battalions formed a brigade (brigata), and three brigades a division.

    The key unit was the Brigade. There were 46 Garibaldi Brigades (Communists), these wore a red bandanna. 33 GL (Giustizia e Libertà) Brigades, these wore a blue bandanna. 12 Matteotti Brigades (socialists), red bandanna. Four Fiamme Verdi (The Green Flames, Catholic Christian Democrats) Brigades, Brigata Osoppo (which had seven operational battalions, non-communists led by the Catholic priest Father Aldo Moretti) and 15 declared Autonomous Brigades. However it should not be supposed that the independent autonomous brigades did not come under CNL control, autonomous simply meant non-party affiliation.

    This is the full list of Partisan leaders Categoria:Partigiani italiani - Wikipedia on the Italian Wikipedia. The only notable foreign Partisan listed there is Rudolf Jacobs (his Partisan nom de guerre was Primo). Jacobs was a German officer, a captain in the navy, who deserted in Italy in 1943 with one of his petty officers, Johann Fritz, taking a half track loaded with petrol and arms to the partisans. Both joined the Brigata Garibaldi, commanded by Ugo Muccini, Rudolf Jacobs serving with particular distinction.

    Peter

    Hello friends, i'm new to this Forum, my name is MickY, wrote from italy, and i'm interested in Partisan warfare and Air war in my area (Reggio Emilia, North Italy). There was A LOT of strangers partisans, and some are British ex-POW: Major Gordon Lett was commander of the "International Brigade" north of La Spezia, Major Oldham was commander of the "Lunense" Brigade, in tuscany, not far from my area in the northern side of the appennine Mountains. There was a British Liaison Officer parachuted to supply the Reggio's Brigades: 26th and 32th Garibaldi Brigade and 284th "Green Flames" Brigade. His name was Captain Michael Lees. Lees organized a very special attack unit called "Black Owls", composed by italians, french, russians, germans and austrian deserters and British Ex-pow. The Back Owls did many attack against the german-fascists communication lines in the rear of the gothic line. In the march 1945, 50 SAS was parachuted in the area. With the best elements of the Reggio's brigades, they blew out the german 51st HQ, responsible of the western side of the gothic line on 27 march 1945. Later the SAS split in four column, forming the so called "Allied battalion" Not less than 600 men of all nationalities break the backbone of the whermacht in this area of the gothic line between Reggio and Modena, opening the doors for the incoming 34th US ID!
     
  9. General Erwin Rommel was so impressed with the performance of the 7th Bersaglieri Regiment in the battles of Mersa Matruh and Alamein that he had the following words inscribed in a monument dedicated to them, 'The German soldier impressed the world, the Italian bersaglieri impressed the German soldier!'
     
  10. Wills

    Wills Very Senior Member

    During one of my postings we had a bloke who had been on exchange to the Bersagliere,(also a Hereford Hooligan) he said do not believe a word of the jokes about these guys they are superfit and good soldiers.

    Morale is the mightiest weapon in any commanders armoury. the impression appears to be that of a war too far for the Italian people. Not a good foundation for high morale.

    165 Bersaglieri - YouTube
     
  11. PeterG

    PeterG Senior Member

    Italian soldiers are neither better nor worse than the soldiers of any other nation. All men are by nature fond of the family, of life and peace. To enjoy war is surely degenerate; it appeals more to the single, adventure-seeking man than to the father of a family. Yet in the life of a nation the father, as head of the smallest unit, is more important than the adventurous youth, who in war is the first to be sacrificed. This fact was even more significant to the Italian, who lives so much within the family, than to the German. If the father of a large and young family is killed in action, the only result is bitterness and woe.

    Before the days of Mussolini, Italy was not averse to war. How otherwise could it have successfully borne the heavy and protracted battles of the Isonzo during the First World War? Piedmont is the cradle of Italy’s military prowess. With the exception of Prussia, no dynasty was ever as militant as the House of Savoy. It was the campaigns of the Piedmontese battalions that unified Italy, thereby fulfilling the dreams of many generations. Everywhere the memorials bore witness to this fact.

    At Turin and in that neighborhood were a number of military schools. The Piedmontese nobility, like the Prussian one, put service in the army on a higher plane than any other service to the state. The discipline was good. In Piedmont there were also many alpine units, the best that the Italian Army could produce --- proud, quiet, outwardly not very disciplined troops, but reliable types, brought up the hard way, accustomed to camping in the eternal snows with only the barest supplies. They were magnificent soldiers, to whose pride and modesty I paid tribute whenever I happened to encounter an Alpino. The Navy, too, was good, though I had few contacts with it.
    Quoted from Neither Fear Nor Hope, published 1963, by General Rudolf Theodor Frido von Senger und Etterlin, translated by George Malcolm (London, Macdonald). General Senger und Etterlin was the defender of Cassino and the German commander of the XIV Panzer Corps, he had a reasonably good grasp of the value of fighting men.
     

    Attached Files:

  12. PeterG

    PeterG Senior Member

    ... The RSI (Repubblica Sociale Italiana) while dealing with invasion on three fronts and a civil war managed to arm over 800 thousand Italian troops, fighting beside the Germans on all fronts, in and outside Italy, as opposed to the 28 thousand ("co-belligerent" Royal Army troops) which supported the Allies in Italy, mostly in non-combat roles.
    Wow! 800,000 fighting on all fronts! Where do you get these numbers from?

    The official figures show a peak of 327,000 RSI forces in the spring of 1944, but there were massive desertions to the Partisans particularly from the thousands recruited from the 810,000 servicemen captured and taken to Germany in 1943. The SS in April 1945 calculated that there was a total of 134,850 RSI personnel:

    Guardia Nazionale Republicana 72,000
    Brigate Nere 22,000
    X-Mas 4,800
    Brigata Ettore Muti 1,000
    leaving 35,000 (quite a drop from '800 thousand'!) for the four regular army divisions under Graziani.

    Source
    Fascismo: l'esercito della Rsi
     
  13. Takrouna1943

    Takrouna1943 Member

    The Italians stopped Montgomery in his last battle in Africa.
     
  14. Wills

    Wills Very Senior Member

  15. TiredOldSoldier

    TiredOldSoldier Senior Member

    Italy's armed forces had many deficiencies, some of which were never made good, leading to, sometimes decisive, tactical inferiority. As the caste system practically ensured morale and unit cohesion was rarely better than average it's a good recipe for defeat.

    Deficiencies in equipment were mainly due to the fascist "autarchia" (self reliance), strongly supported by the industrialists, that led to a huge percentage of the limited funds available being used to buy inferior (sometimes close to useless) domestic equipment insted of adopting proven foreign designs as almost everybody else did, a good example is light AA for ships where the Swedish Bofors and Swiss Oerlikon designs were much better than the local Breda and Scotti that lacked a recoil system.
    Some of those deficiencies have become myths, there was a lot of post-war controversy in Italy over the choice of radials over water cooled engines for fighters. IMO the real issue is the local industry couldn't come up with any (radial or in line) reliable engine of over 1100 HP and as aircraft weights went up due to armour and armament needs that engine was badly needed, What's wrong with the Zero, P47, La7, Fw 190A, or Corsair ? (all radial engined designs). The reason Italian medium bombers were 3 engined is that two couldn't provide enough power.

    Peacetime training was unrealistic and so some areas of combat were not examined or trained for at all. For example:
    - Night fighting for ships (even in 1943 the Regia Marina lacked a decent starshell).
    - Tank fighting, the basic 1940 Italian "tank" (the L3) was MG armed and at a big disadvantage against even the Boys ATR armed British light forces. The M13/40 was designed as a "breathrough tank" not a cruiser, Italy lacked a true manouver tank for all of the war.
    - The Regia Areonautica stuck to WW1 era V formations, usuitable for high speed planes, for the whole war.
    - Air cooperation with ships, some blue on blue incidents happened to every combattant but the Regia Areonautica and Regia Marina never tried to train together due to interservice rivalry and early in the war the Regia Areonautica probably attacked the wrong targets more often than the right ones
    - Planning, Italian forces started the war with some critical, and hard to explain, shortages in equipment, like aircraft MG ammo in NA.

    The officer corps was riddled with corruption, crony system and mediocrity, I can find no other army where the man responsible for it's worst debacle ended up as supreme commander (Badoglio commanded the corps that broke at Caporetto partly because he delayed autorization for artillery fire too long).
    When faced with the unexpected the reaction capability of the average Italian commanders was close to nonexistent (a characteristic they shared with the 1940 French though the later was more a doctrinal thing while the Italian was the result of a system that strongly discouraged initiative), lack of foreplanning for perfectly predictable scenarios is also a mistery, isn't that what commands are supposed to do?
    - The abortive attack on the French alpine defences with incomplete and partially mobilized units is a rare example of military bungling.
    - There were no plans to reinforce the Greek front if the Greeks were going to fight leaving the 9 divisions (most binary) in Albania to face the 13 (ternary) Greek divisions that would be mobilized, as a result units were shipped across the Adriatic and committed to combat with no heavy weapons and artillery support.
    - The Italian army in NA did practically nothing until the British managed to gather enough strength to attack it in December.
    - Italy lost a third of it's merchant navy in one stroke when the DOW cought it outside the Med.

    Despite the above combat performance was often a lot better than the British propaganda gave the impression. The propaganda sometimes backfired as shown in the over ambitious Tobruk raid where the commandos were soundly beaten by rear area troops.

    RN warship losses in 1940-43 in the Med were higher than Regia Marina ones, despite ULTRA and the Italians having to keep open multiple convoy routes while the British could limit thenselves to a few "maximum effort" convoys.
    In the Balkans, AOI and early desert the air war was fairly balanced, afterwards there was a technological gap only parly corrected by the introduction of the Mc 202.

    I would also discount most tales of "Italians fighting well under German command" by Rommel, he had a big personal agenda there and AFAIK there were no Italian units with German officers in NA.
     
  16. Varasc

    Varasc Senior Member

    As an Italian, I really appreciated this topic.. I have to say that our participation in the Second World War was not wanted nor appreciated by the common people. Furthermore, we had to fight under the approssimative and unreal orders of Benito Mussolini who, apart his mad behaviour in politics and economy, had no military mind at all. Just for instance, we didn't use the radar, although we had one of the strongest fleets among the Western powers; we had no aircarriers, because, according to the "duce", Italy was a natural aircarrier herself. We had to fight with biplanes against the Hurricanes, the Spitfires. In the desert war, our generals commanded from well-protected bunkers, many miles away from the real battlefield - just quite different from Rommel.

    I may continue with such examples for a day or even more. Anyway we had excellent troops, like the "Folgore" and "Nembo" paratroopers (and the Folgore, instead to hit Malta, was sent in the desert), the Bersaglieri, the early X Mas. Even if with light tanks like the M13 and M14 models, both the Ariete and Centauro divisions fought well in the desert.
    But I would like you all to consider, why and how to fight decisively, for a fool Government who send the paratroopers in the desert, like common infantry? Or our wonderful Alpini, probably the best mountain troops even at our days, to fight in the Russian and Ukraininian plains? Just the worst dictatorship could do something like this shame.
     
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  17. leccy

    leccy Senior Member

    The Italians stopped Montgomery in his last battle in Africa.

    Which battle?, he had hard fighting but he won.
     
  18. It was at the Gazala Line where the Trieste Division obtained an important victory for Italians to savour. General Erwin Rommel on this occasion had flanked the British from the south and then stumbled into a minefield and ran out of petrol. General Rommel was on the verge of surrendering when the Trieste worked there way through the minefields under artillery and air attack and saved the entire Afrika Korps from capitulation. (Source: Italy's North African Misadventure. By Walter S. Zapotoczny.)
     
  19. Wills

    Wills Very Senior Member

  20. Jeanh

    Jeanh Junior Member

    The Italian Army had two notable successes in the war on offense...the first was the invasion of British Somaliland in late 1940, which drove the British back. The British ultimately regained the ground and conquered East Africa, but the initial drive was a success.

    The second was the charge of the Savoia Cavalry against the Russians in mid-1942, the last great cavalry charge in history, which routed the Soviet defenders.

    Italy's greatest wartime achievements were noted above...the Folgore Division's stand at Alamein and the midget submarine crews. The leader of the "pigs," Count Luigi de la Penne, wound up in the Co-Belligerent Navy, and used his expertise to help clear Naples harbor of mines and wrecked ships. Late in the war, the paperwork for his Medaglio D'Orio for the Alexandria attack caught up with him, and he received the medal from the British Admiral who had commanded (back in 1941) HMS Queen Elizabeth, the ship he had sunk. It was a chivalrous note on which to wrap up de la Penne's career. :)

    Couple of minor quibbles re Luigi Durand de la Penne (later Amiraglio di Squadra and a hero of mine!)- He was not a Count - I have seen him described as such, but my historian contacts in Italy confirmed my belief he was not titled. He received the Medaglio d'Oro from Admiral Sir Charles Morgan who had commanded HMS Valiant when the Italians blew it up - and Morgan not only gave him the medal but also returned his watch, taken when he was captured. As it was a Panerai - made by Rolex - I dare say he was very pleased to get it back. What is very interesting is that while de la Penne and the others were POWs, Winston Churchill, who had described their attack as having been carried out with great courage and ingenuity, demanded reassurance that they were not being harshly treated in their prison camps. Of the six, five went on to help the Allies who had established their own "human torpedo" programme .
    Read Junio Valerio Borghese's "Sea Devils" for an account of the ops of the Decima Flottiglia MAS up to the Armistice, which includes the exploits of the human torpedoes like de la Penne. Fantastic story, and Borghese was their leader, of course. A few years ago I spoke to Prince Borghese's son, and he told me that after the war his family was financially wrecked, because his father had fought on the fascist side after the Armistice - what saved them were the royalties from the book, which, to the family's astonishment, was a best seller... in Britain. Borghese commanded the submarine Scirè, a legend in the Italian Navy, and was so attached to the boat that he gave his son the name Scirè as one of his Christian names...
     

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